Delegate Routine Procedures to Your Lab Technicians

Posted on
September
21,
2017

The democratization of data-intensive technologies such as next-generation sequencing, mass spec-driven multi-omics workflows, and high-resolution imaging systems is making bioinformatic analysis a required function. In the vast majority of labs, a dedicated staff of highly trained computer scientists handles bioinformatics, given that a biologist or bench scientist typically is not trained on using command line tools created by computer scientists. The complexity of bioinformatics analysis can make data processing difficult for a non-computational researcher or lab technician.

When you require your bioinformatics team, or bioinformatician in a small lab, to perform routine tasks for an experiment (e.g. running standardized variant calling pipelines in an NGS lab), you create multiple inefficiencies including the following:

Running your experiments can only happen on the timeline and availability of the bioinformatician or bioinformatics team.

You are using your highly-skilled bioinformatician/bioinformatics team to perform tasks the lab tech could do.

Instead, by using a software platform like Lab7’s Enterprise Science Platform (ESP) that integrates bioinformatics analysis with a system that manages your wet lab operations, you can relinquish control of these simple tasks to the lab technicians. Allowing non-computational techs to fire off routine analyses lets the bioinformatician/bioinformatics team focus on doing what they do best—developing and testing novel analytical methods, which will likely lead to even more efficiencies in your lab in the future.